About

Thanks first

This dataset is other people's work, assembled. Before anything else about it, the people it rests on:

  • The volunteer editors of Wikidata's WikiProject every politician, who have spent years modelling political office-holding as structured, sourced statements and entering it, country by country, legislature by legislature. The project's participants are named on its page; thousands more contributed item by item. Every row in this register is, ultimately, their work — this project only gives it a shape.
  • mySociety, whose EveryPolitician project (2015–2019) first attempted a register of every national legislator, and which — when it wound the project down — deliberately carried the effort into Wikidata rather than letting it die. The WikiProject above is its continuation, and this dataset is downstream of that decision.
  • The Wikidata community and the Wikimedia Foundation, for maintaining the only public-domain knowledge graph at this scale.
  • QLever, the SPARQL engine developed by Hannah Bast's group at the University of Freiburg, whose public endpoint answered every query behind this dataset.

Who

I am Gabriel Rossi. I work at CEPS, the Centre for European Policy Studies, in Brussels. The Long Register is a personal project, built and maintained in the open.

Why this exists

Ask who governs Europe today and you will find a dozen good databases. Ask who governed it in 1935 — or 1735 — and you are back to biographies, one person at a time. The record of European office-holding exists, but it is scattered across national parliamentary handbooks, academic datasets that stop at 1945 or cover only ministers, and archived projects that no longer update.

Wikidata quietly changed that: decades of Wikipedia editing left it holding office-holding statements reaching back to antiquity, in every country, under a public-domain licence. What it lacks is shape — the data is there, but not as a table a historian or a journalist can filter. The Long Register is that table: one row per mandate, every row citing its source, rebuilt monthly, with its known defects published alongside it rather than hidden.

The name takes the project's premise literally. “Since the birth of the country” means the Kingdom of England before the United Kingdom, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before Poland, Austria–Hungary before either. States are recent; the register is long.

Editorial standards

  • Named authorship. Every page and every release is signed by its author, with a working contact address and an institutional affiliation.
  • No hand-typed numbers. Every figure on this site is computed at build time from the released data files. If a number here disagrees with the data, the build is broken — not the prose stretched.
  • Errors are published, then fixed. A deterministic validation suite runs on every refresh; its open findings ship with each release rather than being hidden. Corrections are applied from a reviewed file and recorded in the public changelog.
  • Data is separated from judgement. Scope decisions (which states, which offices) are documented as decisions, with the dissenting reading stated. A language model researches gaps but can only propose; nothing it says enters the data without review or a narrow, audited rule.
  • Versioned and citable. Releases are immutable, checksummed, archived with DOIs, and never edited in place.

Data governance

The register contains personal data of living politicians: the public offices they hold or held, in their public capacity, drawn from public sources. It is processed and published for scientific, historical and statistical research in the public interest (GDPR Art. 85 and 89; Belgian Act of 30 July 2018). It records no special-category data beyond party affiliation and parliamentary group — facts manifestly made public by the data subjects in seeking and holding public office. Data is minimised to the mandate itself: office, dates, jurisdiction, and the public identifiers that source them.

Rectification and objection. If the register states something about you that is inaccurate, write to gabriel.rossi@ceps.eu with the record's statement_id and a verifiable source. Confirmed errors are corrected in the next monthly release and logged in the public changelog; where the error originates in Wikidata, it is also reported upstream. Requests concerning archived immutable versions are handled under the archive's withdrawal policy (Zenodo permits removal for verified personal-data issues).

Elsewhere